Archive for June, 2009

Always Connected – Off The Grid Services

I went last week to record an episode of a TV show where I was a contestant – Millionaire Hot Seat in Melbourne Victoria. They recorded 5 shows in one day and had a rehearsal for each one so it was a long day. As part of the requirements you were not allowed to bring [...]

Time Perspectives and its Effects on Success

Philip Zimbardo in an interesting talk at TED. Part of the talk looks at a study on children who were tested to see if they would take an immediate treat or wait for twice the treat. 2/3 went for the immediate treat and a follow up study 14 years later saw huge differences between the two groups – those that resisted and those that did not with the resist group having higher test scores, getting in less trouble, and being far more future focused.

Asymmetry, Iran and the Internet

Great Quote – Your Company is being Managed by Dead People – to Paraphrase The Sixth Sense

“To a large extent , your company is being managed right now by a small coterie of long departed theorists and practitioners who invented the rules and conventions of modern management back in the early years of the 20th century”

— [...]

Railways, Knowledge and Cost Overruns

Luke Naismith at Knowledge Futures has put up an interesting post about cost overruns in the rail system in Victoria:

http://knowledgefutures.wordpress.com/2009/06/13/cost-overruns-on-rail-budgets-due-to-knowledge-loss/
The post touches on the question of whether to costs are in part due to loss of expertise. This highlights the question of knowledge management. We can codify certain sorts of knowledge where the [...]

Zemanta – Amazing Research and Writing Tool

This is pretty cool – you load Zemanta on to your web browser and it brings up web pages, images and links as you write stuff. Here is a screen shot of this blog with Zemanta loaded with some text of a quote I am using for an article on the future of newspapers. You [...]

Twitter Follows The Hype Cycle

Stan Schroeder at

Mashable is reporting that Twitter has flatlined in terms of visitor growth.Putting aside whether the numbers are accurate what we are seeing in both new and old media is essentially a compressed version of the Gartner Hype Cycle which is used to look at technology adoption. I say [...]

IAB Europe releases online ad expenditure research – Growth Slows in Mature Markets – Weird Reporting

http://www.iabuk.net/en/1/iabeuropereleasesonlineadexpenditureresearch110609.mxs
I find it interesting how this data has been reported in some places. For instance on Techcrunch the headline was:
Online Advertising In Europe: 2008 Was Tough, 2009 Will Be Worse
For a picture that looks like this:

In a world where classified advertising has fallen off a cliff in newspapers with the Newspapers Association of [...]

Thinking on the Future of Newspapers

Have been doing  some thinking and writing on the future of newspapers recently. Was listening to a This Week in Technology Podcast (http://www.twit.tv/197) where Don Tapscott recalled a conversation 20 year old Rahaf Harfoush (www.rahafharfoush.com/ ) who said (paraphrased)

“It is true that I don’t read the newspaper, have you ever seen one of [...]

De Bono in Melbourne

I went to a lunch yesterday where Edward de Bono was the guest speaker. I was a guest of the Victorian Public Sector Continuous Improvement Network (http://www.vpscin.org/?p=2110). Dr de Bono was as always entertaining and informative and the key messages I took home were:

Humour tells us more about the human brain than anything else. That [...]